5 Severed Heads Thrown Onto Crowded Dance Floor
Suspected Mexican drug dealers, masked and armed, burst into the crowded Light and Shadow Club early Wednesday morning, fired into the air, and forced patrons to the floor before leaving 5 grisly trophies. Wrapped in plastic bags, the heads included a cardboard sign stating "The family doesn't kill for money. It doesn't kill women and it doesn't kill the innocent. Only those who deserve it die. Let it be known: This is divine justice."
Shocked patrons had little to say, no doubt due to concerns about their own safety in the increasingly violent Mexican state of Michoacan. With 13 dead policemen, 13 beheadings and mangled bodies strewn throughout the countryside, Michoacan is fast becoming the Mexican poster child for over-the-top violence in an increasingly bloody American led war on drugs.
In a state where the mere death of ones enemies is not enough, bodies have been blown up with grenades, hacked to pieces with machetes, or in an increasingly ominous development, beheaded and hand delivered into the public view.
President Bush's "War on Terror" has often been domestically labeled a failure for his inability to stop the flow of Mexican Nationals into the United States. The fear being that terrorists will taken advantage of the well worn routes of entry along America's porous southern border. In an ironic twist, the administration has also been chastised from south of that border for failing to stop the flow of weapons into Mexican territory.
Mexico, following the lead of the United States, appointed a "Drug Czar" to coordinate Mexico's own "War on Drugs." Like good bureaucrats everywhere, with echoes from Chechnya to Iraq, Santiago Vasconcelos attributes the rising violence to "success" in his one man battle against the drug lords.
Noting that while "Mexico is witnessing extreme violence like we've never seen before," Vasconcelos asserted that the leaders of the nation's drug cartels are no longer a factor because "their heads have been deactivated and put in a jar."
As for the weapons employed in this latest example of "success," Vasconcelos, singling out the American state of Texas, pointed north of the border explaining that "There's a huge black market in weapons in the United States that they have to control...If they closed that, the traffickers would be hitting each other with stones instead of bazookas."
Perhaps, as Vasconcelos suggests, the Mexican "War on Drugs" is being won, if only in the moral sense. But as Savielly Tartakower says; "Moral victories don't count." Let us hope that this latest "victory" is the beginning of the end and that the Mexican people have seen the last of this alarming new trend.
Ogrish Report: D.S. Duncan
